Mike Griffin doesn’t read blogs.

On the surface, I’m sure that he could make a good argument for why he shouldn’t, that many would find compelling. He’s a busy guy, he’s got plenty of other things that he needs to read, why waste time watching a bunch of Interweb people arguing about stuff they know nothing about, yada, yada.

The problem is that, in the twenty-first century, if you ignore the blogosphere, you can get blind sided, as more than a few Senators discovered yesterday.

The administrator may not think much of what people are saying out here, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no significance to it, or that it has no effect on policy and public mood. The blogosphere, and that includes the space blogosphere, may not have as large a readership as the Washington Post, but its readership is not without influence. Congressional staffers read it, and when they do, and read about problems that they’re not necessarily hearing about from NASA, they have to wonder if they’re getting the straight story when Code L comes up to the Hill. What’s being said in the blogs is often a canary in a coal mine of a potential political imbroglio, that is ignored at a bureaucrat’s, or politician’s peril.

If Mike isn’t reading blogs, he’d better make sure that someone he knows and trusts is, and is keeping him abreast.